Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday December 27, 2012 @01:58PM
from the more-magic-always-welcome dept.

An anonymous reader points out developer Àlex Fiestas's work on multiple monitor configuration for Linux. In particular, the screen manager that he and Dan Vrátil are working on — KScreen — gives KDE users a utility "making the configuration of monitors either auto-magical or super simple." This is one thing that's certainly gotten much better in recent years for Linux GUI users in general, but the video in the linked post makes me a little envious — another good reason to swap desktops once in a while.

It is one of the features that I constantly have to wrestle with on Linux (which I use as my main OS), there is currently no real multi-screen support in a major distro and what support there is breaks regularly during updates. (This includes things like full screen flash, changing settings without rebooting, etc). I hope this will work with nvidia drivers, but from past experience I doubt it.

The most common use case for me, is to have my laptop docked to a larger screen, where I have some applications running on my laptop screen, this could be a browser window on a laptop screen, e-mail client etc., and have my ssh windows open on the bigger screen, since code is more important to me, it gets the larger screen real estate. Linux, (maybe not Unity) but KDE, SUCKS MY BALLS for this

Funny that I do this same exact operation on my Linux laptop all the time with KDE. I have used this same feature on KDE since.. version 3.5 at least. It worked fine with an ATI Mobile chip, the intel chip, and now the NVidia chip. In Windows I have to use the cards driver set to make the same thing work in every case (Windows won't do this properly natively, or magically loses screen placement every few hours after coming out of a screen saver). In KDE, the control panel is all I needed with any chip set. It works every time, and remembers my configuration between boots every time. Windows on the other hand has poor behavioral issues. Un-docking for example sometimes causes a full reset. Sometimes it keeps the 2nd display when it's not attached and I can't see anything.